Halsey Says Her Duet With Lauren Jauregui Is “A Love Song For The LGBT Community”

Love is love on Halsey and Lauren Jauregui’s new tune “Strangers.”

Halsey opened up on the Zach Sang show about her upcoming collaboration with the Fifth Harmony member, and says the new tune celebrates same-sex love. She purposefully recruited Lauren for the track because she doesn’t identify as a straight person. “I was thinking to myself, if I want this song to be believable, it needs to be real,” Halsey said (via iHeart). “So I’m not going to put a girl on the song to sing who’s straight. I’m just not going to do it. So I reached out to Lauren and she came in and she cut the vocal and it sounds awesome.”

She also described why the two sound so swell together. “Our voices sound really cool together because we both have really raspy voices,” she continued. “Mine’s a little more delicate than hers. Hers is like really powerful and big and raspy, and mine is kind of like light and raspy.”

The Badlands singer mentions artists like Troye Sivan and Sam Smith who’ve helped pave the way, but realizes there hasn’t been a song from the female perspective quite like this. “I just love that Lauren and I are two women who have a mainstream pop presence doing a love song for the LGBT community,” she said, adding, “It’s unheard of. It’s very rare to see it from a female perspective….At no point in the song does it make a point to say that it’s a gay love song. It’s just a love song that happens to use same-sex pronouns.”